


The Bad Days of Peter Jolick

by KChasm



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Don't Worry About It, Gen, Isekai, It's my own Batman universe not directly related to any preexisting one, might delete later, oc-insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22312558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KChasm/pseuds/KChasm
Summary: A man finds himself dropped into Gotham City with little more than the clothes on his back and a philosophical attitude toward the whole thing.He adjusts, maybe.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

The low cloud cover blotted out the stars and the waning moon, bringing with it the distant smell of rain. Groups of streetlights stood unlit, weeks beyond the acceptable for timely repair.

Gotham City was dark, dead dark. Not totally—never totally, the megapolis that it was—but the only lights at this time of night were man-made: The lure of a 24-hour shop here, the occasional marquee or neon sign there. A street washed bright, for a moment, as a driver tended to some late-night errand, their car’s headlights throwing harsh shadows in all the wrong directions.

It was a terrible night to be caught out in.

It was an opportune night to hide. Atop a dark, flat-topped building, a shadow detached itself from the parapet.

“Green Lantern,” a voice rasped.

Between the static, another voice answered. This one was cleaner, more at ease. “You there, Batman?”

“I’m here,” the first voice said. “But your ‘dimensional tear’ isn’t.”

The static carried alone, at first. “Yeah, it looks like the dimensional bleed closed up, but something came through,” the second voice said. “You don’t see anything? Fire? Killer alien...uh, robots?”

“How accurate are your readings?”

“You asking if this is a false alarm? Sorry to disappoint—I double-checked the figures and everything. There was _definitely_ some sort of dimensional bleed there—something opened up, and then something came through. You really don’t see anything?”

For a moment, a streetlight flickered. But just barely, and just for a moment.

“What am I looking for?” asked the first voice.

“Screaming, usually. Fire. Killer alien robots.” For the first time, the easygoing tone of the second voice hardened into something with concern. “This one’s smaller than most of the bleeds I’ve seen, but...I don’t know. You should see _something_.”

“So something came through a dimensional tear, but managed to escape before it could be detected. And you don’t know what it is, or where it came from.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Maybe if it’d lasted longer I could have figured a source, but all I can tell you is that the displacement’s too big for whatever it is to _not_ be obvious.” A second passed. Another, without response. “Batman, you there?”

The man in the shadows was there, but he wasn’t answering. From his place at the roof, he peered down, studying the alleyways and storefronts.

Something had come to Gotham, something that had fled as soon as it had arrived—an action that spoke of presence of mind, of deliberateness. And while there was no way to say thatwhatever being this was _didn’t_ have benign intentions—

There were times for blind optimism, and this wasn’t one of them. “I’ll call you back,” the Batman said, and cut off the Green Lantern’s voice mid-protest. A touch of a few buttons, and the communicator returned to staticky life.

“Oracle,” said the Batman. “Are you awake?”

This time, the voice over the communicator was a young woman’s, tired but alert. “Mostly,” it admitted. “You caught me at a good time—just finishing a few background checks. What’s up?”

“Can you connect to any of the video surveillance cameras at my location? Look for footage as far back as an hour ago.”

“Uh, let’s see...” Faint, over the channel, was the sound of rapidfire typing. “I’ve pulled up the integrated camera network, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything connected to the grid where you are. Well, no, I’m seeing one camera here, but it’s been down for the last two weeks.” A pause. “Something we should be worried about?”

* * *

“So what you’re telling me—is that this place is called _‘Gotham’_?”

The teenager behind the counter of the 24-hour shop was trying his best to look both as cooperative and as invisible as possible. It was a difficult task, and the man with the bird’s-nest hair who was thrusting a waterlogged print of yesterday’s front pages in his face wasn’t helping.

“Gotham _City_ ,” the teenager corrected, steadfastly avoiding eye contact.

“And when you say ‘Gotham,’ you wouldn’t happen to mean ‘New York,’ would you?” the man asked.

“No.”

“I’m asking because they used to _call_ New York ‘Gotham,’ so it’d be very, very clever, if this was New York, and you told me it was ‘Gotham.’”

“New York’s another state,” said the teenager, and then said, before he could stop himself: “Are—are you okay?”

The bird’s-nest man smiled, wide and toothed. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I think I’ve been drugged!”

* * *

“Maybe,” said the Batman.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you seen this before? That was an previous, incomplete version of the chapter that I didn't replace until now. Whoops!

The homeless shelter was a grand brick-and-stone block, deposited to the side of a run-down street. There was very little to mark it for its purpose, except for a plaque by the front doors that thanked the Martha Wayne Foundation for its generous sponsorship. Peter Jolick didn’t know who Martha Wayne was, but as far as he was concerned, she was up for sainthood, even if her sponsoree was a bit rank to the nose.

No point being choosy, not when you were out of choices. And boy, was he out of choices.

He cranked the smile on his face up to brilliant as he waved to the workers—the folks who were actually there _voluntarily_ , for some reason. The expression reflected absolutely nothing of what he felt on the inside, of course, but that was nothing new, especially these days. Turned out it was _hard_ to get a living, if you were from another planet. A little something to do with the total lack of work history. Or educational background. Or any form of identity, for that matter.

He wasn’t going to get through another half-a-month of this. Or maybe he was! Who knew? This was going to be a wonderful journey he’d be going on, him and his neuroses.

At least he had his own bed.

When he got to his bed, though. There was a man standing there. And he _wasn’t_ his bunkmate.

Peter let the smile on his face solidify. “Looking for someone?”

The man gave Peter a quick once-over, giving Peter the opportunity to return the favor. He was an odd piece out, this mystery man—sure, he _might_ have been just another unfortunate in the building, checking to see if someone had a comfier mattress, but Peter doubted it. There was something about this guy—some air of assuredness, like sure, maybe he was standing in the middle of a shelter at this moment, but give him half an hour and he could be sitting in a well-lit apartment, chomping on a freshly nuked TV dinner, instead.

Very suspicious. Very interesting!

“Hey,” said the man. “You the guy looking for work?”

The smile on Peter’s face stretched just a touch wider. He couldn’t help himself. “Am I?” he said. “Me and everyone else in this house of squalor. Why? Are you offering?”

“Maybe. Word is, you’ve been saying you’re good at electronics. That true?”

It _was_ true! True that he’d been saying it, at least. Something that barely resembled a chuckle squeezed through his throat. “You need to do some behind-the-scenes remodeling? I’m your man.”

“What we need’s a guy who knows how to connect wires. You don’t ask any questions, and we pay you in cash. You up for that?”

 _Very_ suspicious. _Very_ interesting. The best thing to do, reasonably speaking, was to turn the man down.

“Like I said, I’m your man,” Peter said. “When do we start?”

* * *

The car took Peter to a different kind of Gotham City, one much higher-class than he’d seen during his last two weeks and change. Instead of rows of warehouses and tenements crumbling at the edges, there were towering steel skyscrapers, squared windows alternating between dark and light in the night like a gargantuan Advent calendar with far too many days.

The building they stopped at was no exception— _T_ _he Iceberg Lounge_ , as the lettering above the marquee read. If the part of the city they were in was high-class, this building seemed a class above even that. A crowd of people were gathered about the entrance, and it didn’t take a critical eye to catch the fancy jewelry and tailored suits and dresses.

Peter didn’t go through the front door, obviously. His new friend led him around, into an alley. Service entry for the riffraff.

“There’s something wrong with the electricity in the back,” the man said, as he led Peter through a series of grody hallways—just as populated as the front, but with a much different clientele: Cooks, busboys, half-shaved men with too many scars. “It got knocked off, somehow—you see? And our old guy isn’t here anymore, so we need someone to fix it. Whaddya think?”

“What do I think?” That that hallway was pretty dark, for one. That he was somewhere around the point of no return, here, for another, but that wasn’t as important. “I think I’m going to need a set of tools, unless you want me clawing into the walls with my fingernails.”

The man nodded slowly. “Yeah, sure—our old guy left his tools here. I’ll have somebody get them for you. Sit tight, yeah? Or else.”

Or else what?

He sat, very tightly, very obediently anyway, and when the man returned with the toolbox—well! The lighting wasn’t the best in that hallway, but the discolored spots across the top of it looked an _awful_ lot like a splatter pattern.

Peter laughed, a rotten, joyous exclamation, and followed the man into the dark.

The cause of the problem was obvious enough, once the right slice of walling had been removed. Peter grasped the culprit carefully in gloved fingers and lifted it—away from anything electric, and high enough that his guidealong pointing the flashlight could see.

The flashlight shuddered. Peter couldn’t blame it, or the man behind it. “Care for some fried rat?” he asked.

“Cut it out,” the man snapped. “How long till this thing gets fixed?”

Peter chuckled. “ _Well_ —who can say, really?” He tossed the offending object to the side, where it thudded meatily. For a moment, the flashlight followed it, before snapping back over his shoulder. “Luckily for us, your ex-electrician left behind a nice supply of junction boxes. I don’t suppose I could ask what happened to him?”

“He talked too much—that’s what happened to him,” the man snapped. “Seriously, how long is this gonna take?”

“Like I _said_ , we won’t know till we’ve got all the little knickknacks and doodads installed.” Ooh, and these were some _fancy_ wire strippers. A nice gap in the legs, to get the coating off without cutting the wires inside. Good heft, too. “Is there a deadline involved?”

“There’s no deadline, not exactly—the boss’ got all of us working around the mess. He’d probably want this done quick, though.”

“‘Boss,’ you say?” There was a length of wire to feed into all the right places. It went through easily, which was good news to all involved. “You know, I never asked—who _is_ in charge of this fine establishment?”

“That would be _me_.”

Peter craned his neck backward as the shape materialized out of the shadows. At first, all Peter could understand of it was something _white_ —but then he blinked, and the dress shirt gained the outline of a black dinner jacket around it. This man wasn’t a fit for maintenance hallways—he was dressed up as snappily as anyone else Peter had seen coming in through the front, tux and all the attachments. A closed black umbrella hung from his hand, its handle clasped to make a makeshift cane, and he even had a monocle (because who had time for both eyes) to complete the whole ensemble.

He squinted up through that monocle, and Peter’s new friend took half a step backward in response—as if he didn’t tower head, shoulders, and nearly chest over Tux there. Then that lens turned on Peter, who realized he sort of understood what was so frightening to his bringer-after. There was something pretty, _pretty_ sharp in that appraising eye. Sharp, and dangerous besides.

“Who is this, Raven? I don’t recognize him. Some cuckoo that you’ve snuck into my nest?”

“Just the temporary electrician, Boss. We still needed a new one after the last one...” his eyes, and the beam of the flashlight flickered over, for a moment, “...left.”

“Hm. And I don’t suppose you’ve checked his credentials?”

Raven looked at Peter, as if trying to communicate to him that this might be a good time to fish out his bachelor’s. Unfortunately, all of Peter’s college credits were in another universe, so all he got was big, crooked Peter smile. “I got him from the homeless shelter,” Raven said, instead. “I figured we could get him for cheap.”

“And if his meandering hands cut off power to the _other_ half of the building?” The question was punctuated by the point of the umbrella in Peter’s general direction.

Raven didn’t have an answer to that rhetorical question. Or maybe he figured he’d put his foot too far down his craw already. He stood stiff and still, with a brand new sheen of sweat.

Tux, done dressing down his employee, now rounded on Peter directly. “And what do you have to say for yourself?” he said. “ _Can_ I trust you to wire a room—without wiring anything else into it?”

Peter felt the muscles around his mouth begin to involuntarily stretch. He was trying for chipper, he panic-realized, which was terrible enough on its own but all the more so because he was pretty certain it _wasn’t working_. “I’m not sure what you mean by _that_ ,” he answered, in a voice he hadn’t meant nor wanted to come out of his throat. “It sounds like you think I might have some sort of—”

Something in his throat hitched—pushed air out of his lungs with a sound a bit too much like a brief, choked laugh.

“—heh, eh, _nefarious purpose_ in mind.”

If there had been something Peter’s brain could have pushed out through his lips to endear Peter to Tux—that hadn’t been it at all, probably. The aim of the umbrella became a bit steadier, a bit more Peter-ward. “A man in my position has to have concerns about his flock,” he said. “And you, my friend, are an _odd egg out_.”

Peter didn’t gasp, clasp his hands together, and simper, “Aw, we’re friends _already_?” but it was a very, very close thing, accomplished only through a last-moment mental clampdown. “Well, nothing to worry about from me!” he chirped instead. _Chirped_ , because he _couldn’t stop_. “I’m not a man with a lot of job prospects. Comes from being, uh, heh heh—forcibly relocated.”

“Oh? Relocated from where?”

“Oh, you know, completely different state.” This was technically true. “I kind of, uh, left everything behind. Ended up on the streets of Gotham without even a credit card. Ain’t that a hoot?”

“I see.” The umbrella wavered, as Tux seemed to mull the backstory over. “And I trust you have the electrical experience necessary to solve our little blackout problem?”

“Well, I _do_ like to think of myself as something of a whiz with the ol’ wires.”

“And I like to think that I’m not as foolish as to trust an unknown party with my infrastructure at the very first.” Tux stepped back, and his umbrella resumed a more canish role. “But I’ll give you a chance—under supervision, of course. Raven?”

Raven hopped, spine-first. “Yes, Boss?”

“I don’t think I need to tell you that if our friend turns out less benign than he claims, it’ll be _your_ goose that’s cooked.”

“Of course, Boss! I’ll keep an eye on him, definitely!” And a hand, too—Raven’s fingers were suddenly very tight around Peter’s shoulder.

Also, around Peter’s shoulder at all.

“Hm. See that you do. And for god’s sake, get the man a comb! His hair looks like—like—”

“A bird’s nest?” Raven supplied.

“ _Just find him something_.” And in lieu of any further farewell, Tux spun on the heel of his shiny, shiny shoe and passed them by properly, stalking away into much brighter hallways.

Raven didn’t release his grip—and his breath—until well after the man had disappeared around the corner. “Are you nuts?” he said. “Don’t you know who that is?”

“Not a clue!” Peter tried commanding his facial muscles into relaxation. It didn’t work. “Charming man, though, wasn’t he?”

Raven’s expression was aghast. Ghastly. Ghostly, almost. “That was the Boss,” he said. “That was the _Penguin_.”

“‘Penguin’?” Peter tried to put together the image of a squat, monochrome, flightless bird with the man who’d just let them be, and found it...strangely easy, to be honest. “Is that a, uh, crack at his height? Because I’m not sure those kinds of jokes _fly_ , nowadays. Though neither do penguins—”

“This isn’t a _joke_ ,” Raven hissed. “You mouth off to the boss, and you might end up dead. Or _worse_.”

Ah.

Huh.

So this employment was _that_ sort of illegitimate. And here Peter’d hoped that Tux—sorry, _Penguin_ —had just been avoiding the unions. “Well, tell you what,” Peter said, with levity he didn’t near feel, “if I go down, I promise not to take you down with me. How’s that?”

“...Just get to work.”

Peter cackled, and felt none of it. “Ten-four, good buddy!”

* * *

All in all, replacing a rat-chewed wire wasn’t too difficult a job, by Peter’s standards. He’d pulled through tougher by far, not to mention much more complicated. Mind, the _stakes_ were a bit higher, this time around, but in the end, electricizing was still electricizing, which put it a rung or two behind soldering a circuit board together.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Peter muttered. “I have the utmost respect for electricians. Why, I daresay I’m lucky to be counted among their number. There’s no other company that knows quite so well how to _light up a room_ —”

“What?”

“Nothing!” Peter unbent himself out of the wall. “Or, well, that _ought_ to be the run of it. Care for a test run?”

Raven looked more than a titch hesitant to turn his back—that last threat from the Penguin, no doubt—but it was easy enough for the man to keep one eye on him while he fumbled blindly for the lightswitch, first swipe missing, then a second, and then—

There was a _thunk_.

One by one, down the hallway, the florescent lights buzzed to life.

Peter felt muscles unclench he hadn’t known he’d had.

“Huh,” said Raven.

“What can I say?” said Peter. This time, the stretched-out grin was more relief than fear. “When it comes to wiring, I’m worth every penny! Uh, heh heh—speaking of which...”

“Yeah, I’ll tell the boss you did a good job.” The flashlight in Raven’s hand clicked off. “Any more small jobs like this, I might look you up again. Are you still living in that shelter—”

And then, of course, the lights went _out_. All of them, this time, and not just the ones that Peter had been working on.

“Huh,” Peter said.

Raven was a touch less restrained in the way of reactions. “What did you do?”

Despite himself, some tongue of indignation flared up. “ _I_ didn’t do anything!” Peter snapped back. “I wasn’t even touching _those_ lights. It’s almost like someone turned them off from—”

There was another sound. This one, rather than a _thunk_ , or a _click_ , seemed more a _clatter_. It was, Peter judged, not unlike the sound of a flashlight tumbling down the floor of an empty hallway.

The _fourth_ sound was a very Ravenesque cry of pain that was very, very abruptly cut off.

There wasn’t a fifth sound.

“Raven?” Peter reached into the darkness. “You there?”

Raven gave no sign of it.

There was nothing to stop the laughter, this time. Peter could feel it rolling up his throat, choking, vomitive. “Raven?” he called again, and the end of the word dissolved into a frayed, high-pitched chortle: _Raven-eh-heh-heh-hee-hee?_ “Feel—uh, heh—feel free to give me a holler, if you’ve left already—heh heh.”

Something moved in the darkness. A sound like fabric. Peter turned blindly toward it.

There were white eyes.

“Oh,” Peter said.


	3. Chapter 3

The eyes towered above Peter. They _shone_ —and the light of the eyes plunged everything else into an ever deeper darkness, erasing the boundaries of the world and everything in it. It seemed, to Peter, that all that existed were those eyes themselves—and the invisible _presence_ of whatever body they belonged to. Because there _was_ a body, Peter was pretty sure—passingly sure. Had to be sure. He could sense it, lurking in the dark.

A thought passed through his head and out the other side of it, even as he felt himself spiral into the web of his own nerves: _The body and the eyes,_ it ran—

 _Hope_ _they’re_ attached _._

Peter’s mouth cracked open. A voice that wasn’t quite his own flowed over his tongue, past his teeth:

“Come here often?”

Christ.

The eyes loomed. Something leathery gripped Peter’s shoulder, then _tightened_. A warning: Whoever—whatever—this was, they weren’t in the mood for laughs (but then neither was he). “Stay here,” the someone-something growled. “Be _quiet_.”

To Peter, these seemed like very reasonable suggestions. He let the hand steer him, till he was back-against-the-wall, and shut his mouth.

It opened again anyway. “I don’t suppose that was _you_ that stopped up Raven just now, was it?” it wheedled.

The eyes, having begun their turning away, turned back once more in Peter’s direction. They didn’t narrow—but somehow, imparted the _impression_ of narrowing, all the way up Peter’s spine and into the part of his middlebrain that dealt in fear.

_Poke poke poke poke poke._

“He’ll live,” something-someone said.

“Well, _good_!” said Peter, which was true, and the exclamation mark after “good” meant _stop_ , and— “It’s just that...”

And he’d _paused_ , too, just then, a pause that had been theatrical and entirely unnecessary and the hand on Peter’s shoulder tightened even further, somewhere on the border of hurt.

“ _What_.”

“Well, I don’t know what kind of lumps you gave him, but there’s the teensy-weensy matter of that he was, ah, heh—he was going to _pay_ me.”

There was a beat of silence. A stupefied silence, Peter might have called it, if the fellow at his shoulder seemed capable of stupefication at all.

Which he didn’t.

Which was fine. He was willing to be stupefied enough for the both of them. Because if he was stupefied maybe he would _stop stop stop stop_ —

“ _You should get_ _another job,_ ” came the strong suggestion.

 _Stop stop stop_ —

He felt his lips curl even farther apart. _Like a skull_ , he thought, and it slotted neatly in between the flashes of everything else roaring and churning through his brain— _skull stop skull stop stop stop_ —

“I’d mail out my resume, but I’m missing an identity at the moment,” he shot back, like some idiot nutcase. Like some idiot nutcase that wanted to _die._ “Turns out all those companies—heh heh—turns out they _look down_ on you a bit if you’re missing all the right little pieces of _paper and plastic_ —”

There was another sound, one that didn’t belong to Peter or his captor. Footsteps—down the hall, and coming closer. Peter craned his neck and thought he saw a _lightening_ down the hallway—the splay of an almost-flashlight-beam, something that’d taken a few bounces off the walls before reaching his eye much diminished.

His shoulderfellow saw it, too. Peter was pushed against the wall one more time—not painfully, or even roughly, but just enough to make the point. “ _Stay here,_ ” the fellow said.

And then the eyes in the dark—disappeared.

Just that: No impression of turning, no hurried patter of departing footsteps to follow them by. Only one moment they’d been there, and the next moment—not.

Peter let himself stare down the hallway, in the direction of a brightening near-to-light and somebody who he suspected was about to get an unpleasant surprise. A frantic, high-pitched giggle tilted out of his throat. “I’ll, ha—I’ll just stick around, then?” he asked somebody or something or nobody, and then giggled again, higher, louder, as if to _ensure_ they would be heard, now that his conversational partner had gone bounding away.

 _Stop._ Stop _—_

Almost but not quite drowned out in his own edge of hearing, the sound of footsteps slowed—halted. For a second, through eyelids crinkled in false mirth, he saw the faint edge of light wavered.

Then there was a choked cry, and the light disappeared, plunging Peter back into full dark.

“Yeah,” said Peter, to nobody in particular. “ _No problemo._ You, uh, huh heh—you take as long as you want, then, huh? No rush. No rush.”

And there wasn’t. In the twisted back passageways of a high-class Gotham nightclub, the dark kept its dark, and the silence its silence.

Peter sank into an angle of floor and wall and, wheezing voicelessly, tried to make himself seem very, very small to the world.

* * *

The lights came back on, eventually. All of them, which Peter thought did a pretty good job showcasing his electricizing chops. The _Penguin_ came back, too, flanked securely by about two hundred percent more heavyweight goonish-looking fellows than he’d had aside going in.

He was also sporting a brand new limp and a blooming black eye,which raised a lot of _very_ interesting questions—questions that rattled behind Peter’s teeth as he debated letting them out. That scowl about the Penguin’s face suggested that that would be a great big blunder of a maneuver.

He almost did it anyway. Almost. Had to clamp his lips tight shut over those pearly whites, and even then he felt his smile stretching his cheeks.

Luckily for him, the Penguin was too busy trying to keep himself from slipping away from his umbrella-cane to notice any smiles in particular. He barely seemed to notice Peter at all, actually—ran one squinty eye across him (the one _without_ the bruising) then turned up to Goon One. “Pay him,” he ordered, and Goon One did, fetching some cash from within his fancy suit—a lot of cash, actually, assuming those weren’t all ones. As a stack, it was thick enough that the neatly folded wad Peter shoved in his pocket without looking too closely (he wasn’t going to start counting _here_ ; how _gauche_ ) was a lot less creased at the outside.

Not entirely uncreased. Just—less. But _seeably_ less.

“Now, Raven,” the Penguin gestured, his free—uncaned—hand waving lazily, “see to it that your new... _contractor_ reaches the shelter safely. I’m sure the both of you can manage that much?”

Raven nodded, taking the insult like a champ. “Of course, Boss.”

“Yes, yes, _of course_.” And with that last mocking mutter, the Penguin turned and—Peter thought it, before he could stop even just that— _waddled_ away, taking his more immediate goons with him. Raven watched him leave till he was around the corner, like he didn’t dare move with the possibility his boss might suddenly turn back again and—what, tell him off some more? Dispense with the snark? Have him shot?

A chuckle filled in in Peter’s lungs. Penguins were meat-eaters, weren’t they?

He forced it to drainage—the _chuckle_.

“Let’s go,” Raven grunted, once it was good and safe, and Peter let a little leftover air escape. Just a _little_ —a puff of air through taut, chapped lips. He touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth, carefully.

“Right behind you!”

“And stop trying to be _funny_ ,” Raven snapped instantly, even as he started making andronivagant tracks. He was moving oddly, Peter noticed, a little stiff around the shoulders. “I told you—this is the Penguin. You got lucky, but you act out like this in front of anyone else, you’ll get _killed_.”

“Nice to hear you’re worried about me!” Peter said. He’d intended it sincere, but the tone of voice the words came out in sounded anything but, and with a giggling chaser besides. He retrieved the wad in his pocket and ran his fingers through it, partially to get its weight in dollars and cents, and also because it was better than looking over and seeing exactly how lead-balloonish the gesture had gone over. The nervousness and neurosis was briefly beaten out by _surprise_ , though, when he realized exactly how much he was holding.

He’d assumed right: Not a one in the bunch. Not even a five or ten. “What do you know,” he muttered. “It’s payday for Petey! H-hey, does your boss _usually_ dole out the dough this generously?” _Or is it just my charming mug,_ he choked down, somehow still bronc-riding normalcy.

“You do your job _good,_ the Penguin rewards you,” Raven answered. Some of the stress seeped out of his shoulders. “He’s a good boss to work for,” he added.

“Appreciate the headhunting, buddy, but—” The nervous spiral was returning, and it didn’t help that Peter wanted to know the answer to the question himself: “—after that whole blackout, I’ve got some, ah, heh, _concerns_ about workplace safety. Who _was_ that dashing fellow, anywho?”

“Yeah, you _did_ say you were from out of state. You never heard of the Bat?”

He said it with the capital letter up front—the _Bat_. “I’m guessing you don’t mean the flappy kind?”

There was a long second in which Peter and Raven were walking in silence. And then Raven took a deep breath, let it out again—slowly—and started speaking. “He’s...this guy,” he said, slowly, like he was he was still laying out the words even as they were coming out. “Or this _thing_ —nobody knows. All anyone _does_ know is that one day a bunch of years ago he started _showing up_. You try to do a living and all the lights go out, and then...”

Raven’s stiffness. The Penguin’s black eye. “Violence?” Peter rasped. “Is it violence? I’m guessing violence.”

“Violence, yeah,” said Raven.

Another stress giggle burbled through Peter’s teeth. “And, eh, is this the gratuitous, senseless violence that’s so popular with the kiddies nowadays, or does he make sure it’s the _right_ kind of folks who get it? If you know what I mean.”

Raven stopped walking. Peered sideways at Peter without moving his head, like a man doing his best to look at something unsightly without having to see it directly—like a big old squashed bug, maybe. Or a corpse.

Peter smiled all the wider. Because it was easier than smiling less, and _this_ way, the guy was sure to catch it no matter how eye-cornerous Peter was at the moment—right?

There was a _tick_ in the flesh over Raven’s jawbone.

And then: “If leave you out the door, you can make it back to the shelter alright. Right?”

“Right,” said Peter, and, blessedly, nothing else.

“Right,” echoed Raven. “Then—look, if we need any more electric work done, I’ll check with the Penguin and see if he’s okay with hiring you a second time. Until then, keep your head down, and _shut up_.” He turned (too fast—Peter heard him curse, reaching for his back) and headed up the hallway again.

Peter watched him go, the same way he’d seen Raven watch his own boss, minutes ago. “What—what do you think?” he whispered to the nobody there. “Maybe I should print business cards.”

And the nobody said nothing at all.

* * *

The shadows of the side alley seemed brighter, on his way out—or maybe his eyes hadn’t adjusted the first time through; who knew? The smell was a lot clearer, too—the scent of urine wafted pretty unpleasantly, a thin showing of eau de misérables across a little slice of wretchedness, nevertheless lit harshly at the edges by the lights shining from around the corner from the establishment’s façade. Couldn’t a man clean his gutters better? What a joke.

He took two steps out, and a hand grabbed him by the shoulder—again!—and spun him around.

It was that somebody-something, “the Bat,” of course—or no, strike that; it was definitely just “somebody.” Now that there was _any_ light happening in the vicinity, Peter felt more than a little like an idiot for having taken this fellow as anything but human. Human in a funny costume—dark gray costume head to toe, gauntlets and boots and a cowl and an actual _cape_ , but definitely probably most likely human.

Also, there was an abstract-looking bat shape on the chest, which was the reason (Peter guessed) that this guy was called “the Bat.” _Maybe_.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” said Peter, which was the intelligent thing to say to someone who’d just finished rearranging skeletons without unwrapping them first.

Luckily, a little bit of wiseacre wasn’t reaching fisticuffs levels just yet. “You said something about your identity,” the Bat said instead, and it took Peter a moment to remember—oh, right, he _had_ said something about that, in between all the rest of the uncorked babbling that had gone spilling out of his piehole.

“Right!” Peter exclaimed, and then, less shoutily, nodding: “Right—I, eh, lost it.”

“You _lost_ it.”

“I don’t even have a social security number anymore.”

Peter detected a hint of skepticism. “And what did you do, to lose an entire identity?” the Bat asked, flatly.

Which was a good question, right? Peter giggled. “Ah, heh heh—well, that’s the thing, right? _I_ didn’t do it. Best I figure, the world got tired of me stomping around and decided to spit me out.”

The skepticism kept skeptic.

“You wouldn’t happen to know if anyone’s hiring, would you?” Peter added. “I do electrics. And mechanics. A little programming on the side, but I’m a quick learner—”

“What’s your name?”

“Going to look me up?” Well, of course he wasn’t going to take his word for it. “Peter Jolick—that’s one l, and a c-k...” He trailed off as the Bat took him by the wrist—not suddenly, or violently, so he probably wasn’t about to be flipped into the wall, or however folks in bat-leading costumes administered beatdowns, but he couldn’t be _sure_. “Ehh,” he indicated warily.

“I’m taking your fingerprints,” explained the Bat. His other hand held a strip of something-or-other, which he was, in fact, applying to the business ends of Peter’s fingertips. And then the Bat carefully rolled that strip up, and stuck it into...

The pocket on a utility belt. A bright mustard yellow utility belt. Had this guy been wearing that the whole time? Considering the state of the ensemble, that should’ve been the _first_ thing to notice.

Kind of a busy day, though. Things falling through the cracks.

People falling through the cracks.

Things falling through the people...

“You’re staying at a homeless shelter at Park Row,” asked the Bat, in a way that didn’t sound like a question.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t cause trouble.”The Bat _shifted_ —

There was a _sound_ —

And then the man seemed to _fly_ , straight upward, like he was taking off—like something had _plucked_ him, straight from earth and from gravity’s grasp. Peter’s head shot up to follow, but all he could get was the momentary glimpse—a silhouette against the night sky, practically invisible, cape spread outwards—

( _Like bat’s wings,_ he thought—)

And he was alone in the alleyway, once more. Or “finally,” maybe.

Or “unfortunately.”

Well, this was some kind of hotspot, at least—that’d been clear enough on the way in. Which meant from here, all he had to do was...

Peter stepped out from the alley and onto the edge of the sidewalk, waving his arm like a maniac. “Taxi!”

  
  



End file.
